


After Hamelin

by LeBibish



Category: Der Rattenfänger von Hameln | The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Character Death, Dark Fairy Tale Elements, Gen, child death implied, period typical death statistics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-18
Updated: 2018-12-24
Packaged: 2019-09-22 02:31:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17051384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LeBibish/pseuds/LeBibish
Summary: There are many stories about the events of Hamelin. They all agree on two things--the presence of a Piper and the absence of the town's children.





	1. The People

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lightningwaltz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lightningwaltz/gifts).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This work was written 743 years and 6 months after the children of Hameln vanished.

The People of Hamelin[i]

 

  1. 1 month after – Stained glass window in the Market Church of Hamelin[ii]



He starts with the piper. Draws the lines carefully on the stark white board, imagining how it will look at the end with the cheeks round and smooth, the hair gently curling behind an ear. He marks the colors of the piper’s suit—red, yellow, blue, white. Bright, eye-catching colors, as fine as any saint he has ever done.

He knows where he will paint the shadows in—the dark paint giving definition to the lively figure. He almost turns to tell one of his apprentices to start mixing the vitreous paint. They need something to do while he concentrates, and it saves him time later.

The silence of the workshop reminds him that he will have to mix the paint himself.

He focuses back on the board.

The town is next, tiny little houses crowded together. It will take quite a bit of lead to hold all of the little pieces of glass together. He won’t be short of materials though, for once. He knows the town has more than enough money to cover the costs.

He marks the colors down—houses white as snow, roofs tiled red as blood. The brown wall, useless as it is, surrounding the town.

He has been working left to right across the board. The river should be next, lined with fields, but he moves up instead to focus on the forest. It takes him longer than it should; he has to repaint the board more than once, to cover and remake the lines over and over again.

No matter what he does, however many times he redraws them, the trees always end up looking like they are moving…writhing…dancing. He leans back finally, stretching his back out painfully and flexing his aching hand.

His eyes are burning—he’s working by candlelight now. He should find the dinner his stomach gave up on having hours ago and go to sleep. He can start again in the morning.

Instead, he leans back to the board, picking up his charcoal. He lets the trees be and sketches in beasts and birds to fill the forest. He makes them innocent and passive—no wolves.

When the forest is done, he goes back to the river. He draws the banks in thick and dark—as tall themselves as the very wall of the town. This, he imagines, is not a river that will ever overflow its banks. A man fishes peacefully, his fishing line stretching into the middle of the gentle curve of the river. He adds the mill’s water wheel on one end, the sheaves of grain of a good harvest year on the other. He tames the river for this, his fantastical window.

The boat gives him difficulty. He means only to include a boatman steering it across gentle water, but somehow the piper shows up again, twice as large as the boatman and drawing the eye to the river’s currents and shadows. He leaves it in.

The mountain must be next, with its jagged maw cracking open the earth.

His charcoal breaks.

It takes such a long time to find a new piece. He thinks briefly again of sleeping but concentrates on his work. He’s afraid to learn that sleeping won’t help.

The gallows and crucifix squat on the mountainside, as black as the hole in the earth next to them. He steels himself to make the graveyard, faded and stretching out into the distance.

A path leads up the mountain, with another piper, monstrously large at the head of a troupe of children. He doesn’t try to draw all 130 children—it’s untenable. Instead, he sketches all the children whose names he remembers (He will never tell this to anyone).

The board sits in his workshop for years, a constant reminder. Until the mayor comes to ask for a window for the church to commemorate the occurrence…and finally agrees to pay for all the materials as the glass maker knew he would. He has apprentices again by then, although they average much older than he usually starts a boy working. Few families are willing to part with their children too soon anymore.

When it’s time to start the work on the Piper’s window, he chases them all off and does the work himself.

The hot iron presses against the glass, cutting the shapes he needs. He paints and fires the pieces himself, the heat of the kiln leaving lines of sweat trailing down the back of his neck, his forehead and cheeks. Slowly, he bends the lead into place around the set pieces and glazes the with great deliberation and care.

The window goes to the market church, a lasting reminder of Hamelin’s loss. It is praised effusively by visitors and town officials. His neighbors say nothing about it to him, but for several months he finds them dropping off extra bits of baking or offering to mend his clothes.

He stops going to church in the mornings, when the window spills bright color across the hard pews. For the rest of his life, he only enters the church at evening services.

 

  1. 100 years after – Town Records of Hamelin[iii]



She is the youngest child of a youngest child of a youngest child. When Bertha’s first-born is baptized in the Market Church in Hamelin, they are surrounded by family. Cousins and siblings, aunts and uncles crowd the church, filling the quiet space with muffled coughing, quickly shushed whispering, and the shuffling of restless feet.

Overhead, the piper’s window sparkles with sunlight, his shining golden pipe lifted in a tune that Bertha can almost hear, echoing under the priest’s sonorous prayers.

Bertha’s family doesn’t go to church often which is barely excused in the eyes of the town by the fact that it is more than half a day’s walk from the walls of Hamelin to their small steading on the edge of the forest. For all that Sunday is a day of rest, there’s still chores to be done and they can’t often spare healthy workers to leave before dawn and come home after dusk. They go on special occasions.

Or when her father’s older brother drives a cart from town to tell her father that the whispers have started up again in town.

It was—according to family lore passed down from sibling to sibling, from mischievous uncle or aunt to wide-eyed nieces and nephews—her grandmother Maurisia’s greatest act of rebellion, marrying a man who lived so far from town. Too far to go to church even weekly.

Maurisia had been her family’s youngest child, just like Bertha. But unlike Bertha, she had never known her older siblings. Maurisia had been born after the piper had come to Hamelin and he had taken Maurisia’s two older brothers and one sister away with him. Bertha cannot imagine growing up without siblings—without brothers to tease and sisters to comfort (and sometimes the other way around). Growing up knowing that they should have been there but weren’t.

Bertha tries to focus on the blessings the priest is laying on her newborn son, but her attention is instead drawn up to the piper’s window. She examines the image of the children dancing up the mountain, following the piper away from the town; Hamelin’s constant reminder of the day their children left—following the Devil himself, according to several townspeople.

Hamelin didn’t need the window to remember, though. No one from the town would ever forget. Not just because of the ban on music in the streets of the town, or the way mothers in the town warned their children not to let the piper get them, or even the way that well-informed visitors to the town were careful not to wear clothing that was too colorful. Everything was marked by that day—Bertha’s own birth was recorded as 74 years since the children of Hamelin left.

And now her son will be marked as born 100 years after.

As the priest turns to bless the font, Bertha forces herself to focus on the ceremony. She smiles down at her little son as she solemnly promises to reject Satan and sin and to believe in the faith of the Church. Her feet ache and she finds herself shifting her weight back and forth, trying to subtly relieve the pressure of standing so long on the cold stone.

It makes her think of her grandmother Maurisia again—being in town always does. The old woman had died when Bertha was still small but one of her strongest childhood memories was her grandmother refusing to go to church with the family one Sunday. (It might, Bertha thinks, have been in the spring. She remembers wearing a brand-new dress, an unusual treat, and being very proud to wear it to church and show it off around town). Her grandmother had claimed that she had been to the market church quite enough as a girl and if anyone questioned her devotion or her likelihood of entering Heaven, they could come see how her knees were still bruised from when her mother took her every day to pray for God’s forgiveness and protection and stare at the Piper’s window.

Bertha startles slightly as the priest lifts her son out of her arms to baptize him. She barely stops herself from grabbing him back and clutching him to her breast. She forces herself to pay attention throughout the rest of the ceremony.

She feels a rush of gratitude to her uncle, her father’s oldest brother, when he picks her and the youngest children up in his borrowed cart afterwards. He’ll take them back to the steading and spend the night before going back to town in the morning. They follow older ways, the forest steadings. It was her father, her grandparent’s youngest son, who inherited the house they grew up in and the interrelated duty to their parents and ancestors. His older brother makes a good living for himself and his family in town.

Bertha can’t imagine living in town. Living without music and dancing, kneeling in that cold church every Sunday, with the constant memories surrounding everyone. She can only imagine how grateful her grandmother must have felt to find an escape.

When they arrive home, Bertha knows that she will be allowed to lay down for a rest while her uncle checks with the few family members left behind to see if everything is ready for that night. By the time the others get back, she will be rested enough to take her place at the bonfire and truly celebrate her son’s naming. There will be music older than memory and wild dancing and the blessings of her family as they welcome their newest member.

It will be a night to remember joyfully.

 

  1. 150 years after – Lunenberg Chronicle[iv]



He finds the story in an old book. The monastery has acquired the collection of Deacon Johann von Lute and they are meant to be copying those books that the head archivist finds worthy.

The little book is not included in that company.

It seems to be a collection of stories and memories of the man’s mother—Frix is honestly surprised the man had spent the time, let alone the ink and parchment, on such a task.

Frix doesn’t mind though. He enjoys reading it; sneaking away from his chores, hiding the little book inside the propped open cover of a book he is supposed to be copying. (Frix enjoys reading under any circumstances, but there’s something especially entertaining about reading something the archivist would want to toss away.)

The archivist has said, several times, sometimes sourly, sometimes incandescently angrily, that they would all be better off if Frix didn’t know how to read. Then he could concentrate on copying the shape of the letters in front of him instead of wasting time thinking about what they mean.

Frix isn’t sure why the archivist fixates on him so much. 

Copying is boring and everyone has their own way to distract themselves. Just the other day, Matthias had spent hours drawing [snails with the heads of cats](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DkFm9YUU4AE1Lrp.jpg) into his manuscript. They were very entertaining. And Rifert, Frix is certain, has mastered the art of sleeping with his eyes open and fixed on the page in front of him. Frix’s habit of reading everything he can is benign and even useful in comparison. But somehow, he’s the one who always gets in trouble and ends up punished.

Only if they catch him, of course. Frix is getting to be very, very good at sneaking.

So good, in fact, that he sneaks an entire page about the book into the records he is currently copying. It is a rather marvelous little tale and he doubts the book itself will survive the archivist’s purge once he puts it back.

Of course, he leaves out quite a bit of the ramblings and details. He won’t get away with much more than a page. And he adds some details that call back to stories in the bible—just in case he does get caught. He can tell them it is now a more improving tale.

What he leaves out is this:

When Katrey was a little girl, there was a long, cold winter followed by a cold, rainy spring followed by a wet, dreary summer. She remembered standing at the door, watching her older brothers drag sleds through the snow when their chores were done. She remembered eating hot porridge while her brothers gazed on enviously with dry, crumbling bread clenched in their hands.

Through the spring, which should have been full of new flowers and brisk but slowly warming days, Katrey mostly remembered the arguments as her brothers snapped and snarled and stared longingly outside into the cold rain. They were all very grateful when the summer finally came. Even if it was still wet, at least it was warm. Her oldest brother would start an apprenticeship in the fall. Both boys were desperate enough to get outside that they were even willing to take the baby along when their mother insisted, so Katrey had a summer of small adventures.

That is how she told it to her son, at least. Her brothers playing with her, hiding under trees while the warm rain fell, sneaking outside during the misty mornings.

At least, until the sickness came.

It started with their neighbor’s daughter. Then Katrey’s brothers. Soon, every family had someone sick. It wasn’t like a normal illness. The very young and the very old were fine. It was the children and the youths who were struck down. It didn’t spread the way sickness usually did either.

Katrey never forgot hearing the adults whispering, scared and helpless, about curses. For the rest of her life, she had nightmares about her brothers.

(Johann never wrote this down, so Frix never learned it, but he had had nightmares too from the first time his mother recounted her vivid memories to him.)

It’s not clear later whether Katrey remembered the doctor coming to their house or if she only remembered being told the story when she was older. He had heard, it was said, that there was something that might help—not to cure the children—but to ease their suffering. Dancing, he told them. Dancing could help. Might help.

The townsmen gathered all of the sick, taking them to the market outside the church, while the women stayed at home. Katrey wasn’t allowed to go with them either.

That’s why she was one of the first people to see the Piper enter town, a flash of brilliant color striding across the bridge. She remembered his pipe, gleaming silver in sun and the way he walked, at times almost lurching like he was about to fall and yet with a strange grace keeping him moving forward.

She didn’t follow him. He moved too quickly, and she wasn’t supposed to leave the house. She never knew what he said to the men in the market, whether he offered to play, or they asked him, or how much they offered to pay him.

What she knew was that he winked at her as he went by and that it made her think of her brothers. She knew that her father came home late that night—half-waking her in the dark, her mother’s arms around her and the house oppressively quiet otherwise.

In the morning, she woke to a horrible cry and saw her mother rush out of the house. She didn’t know what happened then and later all she knew was that her brothers were gone. And no musicians dared enter Hamelin for the rest of her life.

She told this story to her son over and over, when he was young and then again more urgently and repeatedly as she grew old. She made him promise to write it down, to remember it. To remember her brothers.

Dutifully he did and the little book with its memories stayed in his library for many years before ending up in the monastery. There are other books that could have attracted Frix’s attention, but somehow this is the one that calls to him.

He is the only one who ever reads it. As soon as the archivist discovers it, returned to the pile of texts waiting to be copied, a quick glance through is enough for him to decide its fate. The ink is scraped off, the paper reused for a copy of a French poem popular among the aristocracy. Matthias adds an amusing picture of a [nun picking…fruit…](https://twitter.com/sarah_peverley/status/368348807378915328)from a tree along the border.

The names of Katrey’s brothers are lost along the way.

 

  1. 269 years after – Bamberg town records[v]



Most recruiters know better than to stop by Hamelin, but Welf is young and new to his position. Too new to have any friends among the other lokators seeking healthy young settlers to tame the eastern forests. No one tells him to avoid Hamelin. (He probably wouldn’t have listened if anyone had.)

It’s an old, well-established town, Hamelin, and he has a good feeling about it. They’re bound to be feeling the pressure of having too many children and too few inheritances to pass around. A few less mouths to feed, a few less troublesome young men with no prospects, a few less children who are an embarrassment to at least one side of the family…everywhere had someone to send off. Especially when he starts handing out money to “ease the burden of losing their dear family.”

He stops outside of town in a good clearing near the river. Welf has a routine for entering a new town—he makes his own luck. First, he washes up in the river. Checks his reflection to make sure his hair and beard are neatly trimmed. He keeps his belt knife sharp enough to fix himself up when needed. Out of his bag he takes a roll of clothing—much brighter and fancier than what he was wearing before. This would never survive the road, but it is sure to impress the locals.

He checks the places where he has hidden his stash of ready coin and pulls a few pieces to flash about. He’s a prosperous man, Welf. A good man to listen, to trust in a new venture.

Things turn a bit strange from the start—from the moment he strides across the bridge into town. He’s used to attracting attention and a bit of interest, especially from the young women. He’s good at his job for many reasons.

He’s attracting attention, right enough, but it seems to be a bit more hostile than he’s used to. Mothers urge their children indoors and the young women hustle in without any urging at all.

Welf shakes off his vague unease and looks for a tavern. Perhaps something has happened recently, an incident with a stranger in town or problems with a gang—bandits and thieves are recurring problems. He simply has to convince the townspeople he’s trustworthy. It’s generally not too hard. Buy a couple rounds of beer, show up to church in the morning, smile winningly.

It doesn’t seem to help as much as he is used to.

Still, they take the beer. He stays at a table in the tavern. Trying to make himself seem as inviting as possible. People are inclined to ask questions. They can’t help themselves. Eventually, someone will give an opening.

It’s the third round of drinks he buys before someone mutters grudgingly something about how long he’s been on the road.

“Oh, a bit long, I’ll admit,” Welf smiles. “I’m glad enough to have a place to sit and drink and a bed with a roof to sleep in.” Time to add a bit of local color to build rapport, he thinks, and laughs. “You know, I heard a story once about a mountain in these parts.”

Perhaps he doesn’t notice the men around him shifting in their seats. Perhaps he ignores it.

“They say this mountain has a wonderful secret—that if you find just the right cave, you can travel half way around the world in no time at all. Such a marvel!”

The room is silent around him. His smile almost falters but he makes himself smooth it into a friendly grin.

“It sure would make my job easier,” Welf laughs again, nervously. He’s never been in a tavern this quiet—not even in the early morning when the patrons have generally abandoned the place for their own beds.

Looking at the glowering faces of the men around, Welf decides to skip the recruitment speeches for the night. He’d stop by the church in the morning and work on the women of the town. He would undoubtedly have better luck with them.

Still, he could try and salvage at least a little good will now.

He reaches into his coat, still smiling, “Would you gentlemen care for some fine music to entertain you tonight?”

 

  1. 281 years after – The Zimmern Chronicle[vi]



Tragedy, he tells his unborn children, has a purpose. It should be learned from; used as a lesson to make the survivors stronger, better people.

He is proud of his family, of their history and their future, and invested in preserving the strength of both. That is why he hires the scribe to help him chronicle their legacy. It’s also why he makes sure to include several improving stories in between the genuine histories. Comedic moments or tragic tales—they all have a purpose.

He’s heard of the disappearance of the children of Hamelin before. Some distant relation or other lived there once upon a time. Apparently, they still date everything by when it happened to the town. And yet, no one seems to know exactly what happened. Why it happened.

Tragedies should have a purpose.

He hears another story, of a rat catcher who takes vengeance on a town when they refuse to pay him fair wages—he doesn’t remember where. There are several similar stories traveling across the continent.  

It seems as good an explanation as any for Hamelin. It’s got the right structure—just the right amount of suspense and terror to engage the listener and a good solid moral worth remembering. Keep your promise. Pay workers fairly and value the work they do.

It’s the right kind of tragedy for his purpose.

 

*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*--*

[i] Translations from <http://www.medievalists.net/2014/12/pied-piper-hamelin-medieval-mass-abduction/>

 

[ii]  1592 painting of Pied Piper copied from the glass window of Marktkirche in Hamelin, ca. 1300

 

[iii] _It is 100 years since our children left._ Ca. 1300

[iv] _Here follows a marvellous wonder, which transpired in the town of Hamelin in the diocese of Minden, in the Year of Our Lord, 1284, on the Feast of Saints John and Paul. A certain young man thirty years of age, handsome and well-dressed, so that all who saw him admired him because of his appearance, crossed the bridges and entered the town by the West Gate. He then began to play all through the town a silver pipe of the most magnificent sort. All the children who heard his pipe, in the number of 130, followed him to the East Gate and out of the town to the so-called execution place or Calvary. There they proceeded to vanish, so that no trace of them could be found. The mothers of the children ran from town to town, but they found nothing. It is written: A voice was heard from on high, and a mother was bewailing her son. And as one counts the years according to the Year of Our Lord or according to the first, second or third year of an anniversary, so do the people in Hamelin reckon the years after the departure and disappearance of their children. This report I found in an old book. And the mother of the deacon Johann von Lude saw the children depart._ ca. 1430-1450

 

[v] _There is also a mountain which lies approximately a rifle shot away from this town, called Calvary, and the townspeople say that in 1283 a man was seen possibly a musician, wearing clothing of many colors and possessing a pipe, which he played in the town. Whereupon the children in the town ran out as far as the mountain, and there they all disappeared into it. Only two children returned home, and they were naked; one was blind and the other mute. But when the women began to look for their children, the man said to them that he would come again in 300 years and take more children. 130 children had been lost and the people of this place were afraid that the same man would come again in 1583._ Ca. 1553

 

[vi] _Since I am again returning to matters concerning rats, I cannot neglect to mention a miracle of God, which in identical form was reported many years ago in the town of Hamelin in Westphalia concerning the banishment of rats; which story, because of its unusual nature, is definitely worth remembering, and there to conclude, that the Almighty created some odd creatures, without instilling in them human reason._

 _Several hundred years ago the inhabitants of the town of Hamelin in Westphalia were plagued with such a large quantity of rats, that it became unbearable. It so happened that a foreigner, an unknown or traveller, much as the travelling students of long ago, came into town. Hearing the troubles and complaints of burghers, he proposed whether they would consider a reward for him if he were to remove the rats from the town. They were overjoyed with such news and for his offer they promised to pay him a sum of several hundred guilders. With that he went through the town with a little pipe, which he then placed to his mouth and commenced to play. Immediately all the rats in the town came running out of the houses and in unbelievable numbers began to follow his feet as he walked out of the town. He banished them to the nearest mountain and no more rats were seen in the town. This accomplished, he demanded his promised reward. But they had hidden it away, confessing that although they had been in agreement with the sum, that since the matter had caused him no difficulty, but rather he had dispensed with his task so easily, not by hard work, but by an unusual art; therefore, they felt that he should not ask for so much, but lower his sights and take less. The stranger, however, insisted on keeping the original agreement and he persisted in seeking the sum promised him, and if they didn’t give it to him they would rue it. The townspeople, however, stayed with the opinion that this was far too much money, and they no longer wished to give it to him. When he realize that he was not going to receive anything, the stranger began to walk through the streets with his pipe as before. There the majority of the children in the town under the age congregated, and they followed at his feet and out of the town to the nearest mountain. The mountain miraculously opened up and the stranger and the children went inside. Immediately afterwards it closed up again and neither stranger nor children were ever seen again. Now there was great wailing throughout the town and the people could do nothing but commit themselves to God and admit their guilt. The town reported this wondrous story in all its correspondence as an eternal reminder and added the right number on the date according to the birth of Christ; on the end, however, they added to the departure of the children in such and such a year._ Ca. 1565, Count Froben Christoph

 


	2. The Piper

The Piper

 

(5)…and the storyteller 

It wasn’t the rats. It wasn’t even the fleas living on the rats nor the illnesses living in the fleas.

There are many things you can blame on rats and fleas and illnesses—but not the children of Hamelin.

When Death came to Hamelin, he came on two feet.

It was a bit overdramatic. But she rather liked the story. A little drama was good for people. It made life interesting—especially long lives.

The moral was decent too. Promises are important. Deals once made should be honored. It was a good lesson for her people to remember.

Still, there hadn’t been rats. That time.

There were so many terrible things in the world that could snatch away a town’s children. A bad harvest year. A cold winter. A hungry wolf in the woods. A snow and ice swollen river with weak banks.

Life might have its reasons, but its humans who made morals out of them.

It wasn’t rats. She had always found it irritating, when others hunted in her territory.

Still, it makes for a good story. She might have to remember the rats, for another time.

 

(4)…and the [ lokator](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokator)

Three hundred years wasn’t that long, really. It was perhaps ten or fifteen generations of mothers telling cradle stories—and Hamelin had its own ways of keeping the story alive. Humans, she thought, are very good at remembering things. Except when they aren’t.

It seemed like enough time to make it worth testing them—to see if they had truly learned their lesson. If nothing else, it should be long enough for her temper to cool and the next test to be fair.

Besides, she’d given them the warning. It wouldn’t do to not keep her word.

At first, when the stranger came to town, she hadn’t liked him. This lokator, trying to sell her people a vision of the future in a different place. Trying to convince her people go off to some new land and build new towns away from her. No, she didn’t like him. At first.

It was true enough that it could be hard on the sons without an inheritance to support them. The church would have everything left to the oldest son—giving them a chance to hook the younger ones into service. She thought the old ways a bit better—leaving it all to the younger son meant his older brothers had time to make something of themselves before it became an issue.

Either way left plenty of young men without home or hearth though. She listened a bit more.

It occurred to her, as the stranger spoke of the opportunities to be found in new lands, that those lands might be empty in more than one way. If there were no other people, there might not be anything like the Piper either.

Hamelin was hers—had always been and would also be so—but perhaps she could add a bit of land to her possession. If enough of her young ones established a new place together and took her symbols with them, it might be enough.

So, it wasn’t the land agent that sparked her temper, even though she had been wary of him at first.

It wasn’t the young ones who were considering leaving, eager for new prospects and it wasn’t the children clinging to their parents, afraid of the unknown.

It was the parents—the greedy, thoughtless parents. As soon as the recruiter mentioned that families would be compensated for lost labor and the sorrow of parting, several faces lit up with interest. No one pointed out that one less mouth to feed would do its own good for families in need.

That much she didn’t care about. Let them be as petty as they wished; she was thinking of her own plans.

There is nothing said in Hamelin that the Piper doesn’t hear. No plans made that she doesn’t know.

So, she was well aware when several prominent families started scheming. They had no intention of sending their own children off nor the healthy, hard-working peasant children who were, they vaguely acknowledged, somehow important to the town’s economy.

Never mind that they were also the ones who might have a chance of prospering in a new settlement.

No. The plot here was to sell those children they considered ‘burdens’ whether they had any real claim to them or not. They planned to treat the town’s own children like livestock owned by a dishonest merchant, cheating the land agent and his master, and likely ensuring the failure of her own plans.

Children who weren’t thriving in Hamelin’s established prosperity would have little chance in the wilds.

The Piper listened as the wealthiest and most powerful families in town planned to sell the children of the poorest, to rid themselves of the chronically sick and injured, and to banish the town’s orphans. Several of whom, she knew well, were not so much without living parents as they were without living parents willing to acknowledge them.

Her rage was tangible. Across town, axles broke under nominal stress, windows cracked, and animals either fled or hid, cowering.

When she took the children, she felt no guilt.

She felt no remorse for using the land agent as her puppet nor for the compulsion she laid on the children to be sure they would dream of her in their new homes.

She felt no mercy as she listened to the mothers searching through the streets, wailing and screaming.

They wouldn’t have mourned the children of others. The least they could do was mourn their own.

Instead, she left them with a warning. An opportunity. To prove themselves better someday.

It was many years, though, before she allowed another lokator into Hamelin. The town needed the time to recover. By the time she stopped sending them away from her land immediately, most of them had figured out to avoid Hamelin on their own.

The first one to try found that the townspeople of Hamelin remembered their story quite well.

Three hundred years wasn’t that long to wait, really.

 

(3)…and the younger sister

They poisoned themselves.

Out of ignorance and hunger, they poisoned themselves and called it a curse.

The Piper watched as mothers wept and fathers raged, and the town officials tried desperately to look for someone or something to blame.

 She walked unseen through the fields, examining the dark growths on the grain. It wasn’t for her to interfere with the natural patterns of the world. Especially when she hadn’t been asked. Let their dead god and closed-in church do what they could.

Still. Hamelin was her place and its people were her people, even if they didn’t remember it.

She listened to the wailing parents and the pained cries of the afflicted. She listened to the smallest children, to those who didn’t know what was happening but knew that they needed something.

She listened as one little girl asked desperately for help—for anyone to help. As she held her hands over her eyes and begged for someone to help her brothers, to stop their pain and bring them back to her, the Piper listened.

She listened when the desperate doctors, reaching for any answer, told the townspeople that music might ease their pain, that dancing might relieve whatever curse was tearing at their health.

The Piper knew that no music could fix what had gone wrong. Songs could not flush the poison from their bodies or reverse the damage done. And no human musician could play a song that would make them forget the pain they were in.

But she could. A song to make them dance and erase every other thought sensation except the need to dance. The joy in dancing. She could grant them that mercy.

Walking into town in the body of a wandering musician, the Piper caught a glimpse of one of the young ones whose fear and confused sorrow had called to him. She was young enough that she might forget the brothers she was missing so dearly.

She winked at her as she reached out and tweaked her memories. She made sure she would never forget them.

Perhaps one day they would meet again.

 

(2)…and the daughter

She had to teach them how to dance. There was no one else for the children to learn from. The true dances the way they were meant to be danced had been forgotten a long time ago by their ancestors.

They had their own dances, of course, half-remembered and clumsily executed. She watched them and laughed mockingly. What little power was behind them was quickly lost.

They needed a teacher.

She taught them because they found her and asked her to teach them. They wanted to learn the old ways, the old religions.

She didn’t care one way or the other, but she couldn’t blame them for tiring of the Church and its strange restrictions and hypocritical contradictions. For the way it could do little in the face of starvation and illness but promise a better life later.

They didn’t know what she was or what she wasn’t. She didn’t need them to—had never needed them to. Even when the Church had come and either stolen or outright forbidden the old ways, it hadn’t made a difference to her. Her symbols filled the town still, seeping into the unconscious minds of all who lived in her land.

But it amused her to see the children rebelling against the Church and their elders.

So, she let them find her and ask her.

She took the shape of a musician and taught them old songs and ancient dances. She told them stories that had been shared around the fire for generations before the Church came. She showed them how to ask for blessings from the earth and water, air and fire.

She helped them keep their rebellious secrets until they grew too cocky and sure of their ability to hide.

And when she let the Churchmen find them, she offered to help them escape.

She led them away from the town, dancing with wild abandon, their senses temporarily lost to her music. She led them to places long hidden, where others before them had fled to live as they pleased. They would accept not being able to return home again in return for full bellies and safety.

Eventually. Probably.

The Church would have enough hooks in the young children left—in the children yet to be born. She doubted they would let themselves forget what they had lost for a long time.

(Later, she might have a twinge of regret, a stab of pity, watching a young woman being firmly dragged into church by her mother. A mother who never looked at her without looking past her to those long gone. She might, perhaps, have played a bit more music to lead the maiden across the path of a kind man who made his home out in the forest. A young man who knew how to dance some interesting dances.)

Many years after that, the Piper lounged against a tree, her borrowed face warmed by the flickering bonfire.

It was a good night for a celebration. She smiled at the laughing new mother sitting across the fire and raised her pipe to her lips. A little music, a little magic, and long life and well-being to all those who welcomed her at their fires.

 

(5)...and the glass maker

The Piper found the glass maker interesting to watch. His workshop stank of grief and anger as much as any house in the town, but he channeled it into a work of great beauty.

The window was beautiful and evocative— full of bright colors and intricate details, the strength of his memory and emotions resonated through the design. It marked with clear boundaries the Piper’s place.

The land between the river and the mountain had been held by the Piper long, long before the town of Hamelin had had even a single tiny cottage. Since long before humans had dreamed of living there, had even bothered to name the river, the forest, the mountain. By the time they had come and made their claim, the Piper was already inseparable from the land.

All they accomplished by building their walls and roofs, meant to keep things out, was to put themselves into the Piper’s care.

The Piper liked having people to care for. It made things interesting. Short-lived as they were, humans made the world move faster.

The first night, when the artist sketched out the window, the Piper merely watched. There wasn’t much else to be done—sleep would not be a kindness. At least the old man wasn’t alone, even if he didn’t realize the Piper was there.

No one was alone in Hamelin that night or any of the nights before it—throughout the town, families huddled together, filling empty beds and quiet rooms with noisy bodies. Or maybe everyone was alone—the Piper didn’t bother trying to understand.

Later, when the old man finally started piecing the window together, the Piper came to watch him again. This time there were others in the workshop but he chased them away.

There was no one to take care of him while he worked on the window. The Piper found that leaving a bit of bread or cheese close by would end with the man absentmindedly filling his stomach at least.

Perhaps it would be better for him not to eat while handling lead and color powders, but the Piper didn’t mind much. The human condition might be a delicate balancing act between health and death, but the Piper wanted the window finished only a little bit less than the glass maker did.

The window had haunted the glass maker’s life for long enough. Better to have it done and gone than to spend his twilight years trapped with it, whatever the cost. The glass maker was healthy enough in spite of a lifetime of working with heavy metals and hot tools.

And when he wasn’t anymore, the Piper would be there for him.

When Death came to the Piper’s land, it was the Piper who delivered the newly released souls into its shadow. The Piper was possessive of this land and the souls in it. It wouldn’t do to let another make any claims on them—it was bad enough that they insisted on their churches and cross-ridden graveyards.

That was one of the things the Piper liked best about the window—it would dominate the Market Church, beautiful and strange as it was, with the Piper’s own image burned into the minds and souls of the Church-going townspeople.

When it came time to collect the glass maker’s soul, the Piper would take extra care with it, in appreciation.


End file.
